Panel: Politics, funding are the biggest obstacles to interoperability

Interoperability remain a challenge for first responders in the United States, but it is politics and funding--not technology--that are the problems, according to panelists speaking during a webinar hosted by IWCE's Urgent Communications.

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Panel: Politics, funding are the biggest obstacles to interoperability

Last week, in a webinar hosted by IWCE’s Urgent Communications and sponsored by Avtec—click here to view the archived event—panelists discussed the current state of interoperable communications in the U.S., which often are found lacking. Indeed, first responders complained about interoperability issues in the aftermath of the recent Washington Navy Yard shootings, according to several media reports.

The situation appears to be widespread, even though it has been more than two decades since the advent of the Project 25 standard—created, in part, to foster interoperability—and a dozen years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, an event that placed interoperability shortcomings in a harsh light.

Panelists were united in their belief that politics and funding issues are the primary obstacles standing in the way of interoperable communications, wherever they do not exist.

According to Terry Hall, chief of emergency communications for York County, Va., and the immediate past president of the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials (APCO), spoke about the “turf wars” that often ensue.

“Who talks where—that’s the number one when you’re looking at doing anything right now with interoperability,” Hall said. “[And] who owns what … I have a fairly large regional system, and what you run into is, who get the key, and who gets what talk groups.”

Hall told of a plan that he developed that would have resulted in some of the channels from the statewide radio system being programmed into York County radios and vice versa—but politics prevented it from happening.

“So, here I’ve got a $60 million investment and the state has a $250 million investment, and the only way we can communicate with each other is through NPSPAC channels that have very limited coverage, instead of talking on the system real and live. And that’s pure politics—it has nothing to do with the functionality of the radio.”

According to Barbara Jaeger—911 administrator for the state of Arizona and the immediate past president of the National Emergency Number Association (NENA)—interoperability is just as crucial on the 911 side of first response as it is on the radio side.

“If a call cannot be answered by the primary PSAP [public-safety answering point], and it has to be rotated to another PSAP—how do you handle those calls? What happens when a call is received by an agency that has no [such] capability? … I can move that call probably anywhere within a geographic area, but what happens when they get the call—what do they do with that call? They try to transfer it back, and now you’re in this endless loop you can’t resolve.” she said.

Next-generation 911 technology is architected to provide that sort of interoperability, but the 911 sector has significant funding issues that will make it difficult for many agencies to make the transition, Jaeger said.

“Often, you have funding for 911 at a state level, and not at a local level,” she said. “When those costs come down to the communities, they just don’t have the revenues to support it. … We’re in a state where a tax increase can’t even be discussed. ”

Consequently, the state of Arizona is close to launching a managed-services model that Jaeger hopes will make it affordable for PSAPs to upgrade their gear. The state negotiated a monthly per-seat fee that would cover all necessary equipment and component upgrades, as well as maintenance. While a managed-services model is uncommon in the public-safety sector, businesses have been using it for years, according to Jaeger.

In addition to eliminating capital expenditures for equipment, it is possible that many agencies will be able to roll the fee into their existing operating-expenditure budgets, Jaeger said.

“What we went out to the vendor with was, ‘What can we do for this amount of money—per seat, per month—for all of the 911 centers, and all of the positions, in the state?’ … We said, ‘This is how much our revenue is, and what can you do for us?’” she said.

2 comments

We are trying to establishWe are trying to establish interoperability among several fire departments in several counties in the lower Hudson River valley and to do so using the UHF public safety spectrum.
Politics has certainly interfered with this program with the ridiculous planned sale of T-Band Public Safety frequencies. That was clearly done jut to mollify a bunch of dummies in Congress who don’t care about the facts – just want to show some revenue in the LTE project.
Politics is also a big factor in the P-25 program. We cannot get federal grants for radio equipment unless it is P-25, so that means we have to ask for three times as much money to buy P-25 radios which we have to use without any P-25 features for two reasons: 1) there is no P-25 backbone in our area and won’t be for a long, long time; and 2) we’ll be damned if we want to send firefighters into treacherous situations using digital communications.
We will continue to operate on our T-Band portable and mobile radios and build what we have permission to build in the way of T-Band repeaters, but we are severely constrained by the fact that we won’t be able to complete a system to see where additional T-Band repeater sites will be needed, because we won’t get FCC authorization to create them.

Yes, politics and fundingYes, politics and funding have and do play a big part in agencies not having interoperability, but after working in the public safety communications field for 33 years and seeing what I have seen since 2001 I would put the biggest blame on the vendors of P25 equipment for pricing it so high. The vendors saw the dollar signs in their eyes when the economy was good and federal grant dollars were being given out faster than one can make pancakes to they set their prices high. There are very few ways a department that has been use to paying between $250 to $750 for a portable radio to justify spending over $3,500 for a radio even if it does give their personnel interoperability with other agencies. I personally can address the turf wars and deal with the politics but when a vendor sets a price I can’t change that. Another reason I blame the vendors is they continue to sell proprietary radio equipment and systems that is much less expensive than P25. If they truly wanted P25 to become the “standard of choice” then they should have priced P25 equipment to be the same price as or at least close to the cost of proprietary equipment even if it meant reducing the price of P25 and increasing the price of proprietary equipment. This would have probably made P25 extremely attractive to not only public safety, but to public works, public utilities, school systems and even the business community so all could have interoperability during major incidents and disasters.

On the topic of spectrum, since many federal government and military operations occur in the 380 MHz to 420 MHz and many of the larger cities in our nation like Boston, L.A., New York, etc. use the UHF-T band wouldn’t it have made sense and possibly been less expensive to move all non-government operations off 450 MHz to 512 MHz and put all of local and state government operations to include public safety in the same band to coincide with the military and federal government operations? Think about it

I don’t know about you, but it seems we have two major forces working against us when it comes to interoperability with the first being the vendors and the other being our own federal government (Congress and the FCC).

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